PLANA Improves Presurgical Nasal Alignment in Unilateral Cleft Lip

For clinicians managing infants with cleft lip and palate, presurgical infant orthopedics (PSIO) aims to improve nasolabial anatomy before surgical repair. While the long-term benefits of PSIO remain debated in the literature [1, 2, 3, 4], its utility in reducing initial deformity severity is a key consideration for many surgical teams. Traditional techniques like nasoalveolar molding (NAM) can be effective but are often limited by their intensive resource requirements, including specialized expertise and frequent patient visits, which can burden families and limit access to care [5, 6]. This has spurred interest in simplified PSIO strategies that may offer comparable results with greater scalability, creating a need for objective, evidence-based comparisons to guide clinical practice [7].